who has been teaching acting for de- cades (he co-runs the Actors Studio in Los Angeles), told me. "There's no room for that here. He has to embrace it. He can't hide behind it. As he said in the be- ginning, 'It's scary, because it's like my own feelings sticking out.' " "' Th T Sh ' ali " e ruman ow was re ty, Carrey added a few days later. "But I still played a guy who put on a persona to go outside, you know, and I really was look- ing forward to doing something at sea level. To just be on camera. And that's the hardest thing in the world-not to try to make something happen." On the set, he says, "I've been a bit of a control freak. When I did 'The Mask,' I knew every move I was going to make. If you do that, there's nothing organic going on. It can be entertaining and fun, but it's not a chemical reaction, basically. It's mostly posing. There is intent behind it. It's like a dance. This is more throwing things up in the air." Carrey is trying to be accurate, not modest, but he sells himself short, in a way-or, at least, sells short the effect that his virtuosity has on his audience, for whom the precision, the control with which he moves and talks in those car- toon roles is exhilarating, an expression of freedom and rebellion. (It takes a lot of control to play characters who can't control their impulses.) Most male movie comedians of the last decade or so are of the sloppy; shirttails-out variety, capa- ble of conveying only perpetual ado- lescence, but Carrey has the vigorous, bursting physicality of a child combined with the physical confidence of a grown man. In his comedy; there is a potent rage to live. C arrey's willingness to throw things up in the air is actually not new; throughout his career he has avoided safety as if it were a bad smell. In the mid-eighties, when he was a young comic doing impersonations of famous people, and had made a successful leap from the comedy clubs of his native J Canada (he grew up on the outskirts of Toronto) to the clubs of Los Angeles, he dumped the act that had brought him standing ovations every night and began to work more improvisationall)T. Come- dians' material and style are often dic- tated, for better and for worse, by their childhood experiences, and for Carrey the break with his old act was tied partly to his efforts-ongoing, still-to sepa- rate himself from his parents "I did im- pressions of Tom Jones, and Sammy Davis,Jr., and people who weren't of my generation, because I started out want- ing to do whatever dazzled Mom and Dad," he says. ' d then, at a certain point, I saw where it was leading--to Vegas--and I didn't want to go there. Basically; the apex of my career would be doing a killer, right-on impression of someone to the person, and everybody around them would go, 'Oh, he's really got you down.' I didn't want to do that- I wanted to be that person. So I threw all that in the garbage, and started building from the ground up, just building some- thing for myself And it was a very tur- bulent time, because I included a lot of the duplicity I saw in my parents in my work. I was doing jokes about Mom's addiction to pain pills, and things like that, which was not welcome, you know, but I was just adamant about it. This was the truth for me; I had to express it. And I was terrified, because I had this act that was foolproof and would make me a lot of money; and I had everybody in the world telling me, 'You can't do it, you're looking a gift horse in the mouth, people don't get second chances in this profession.' " A few people did encourage him, he says, including Rodney Dangerfield, an early champion of Carrey's, and his friend Judd Apatow, who met Carrey just after he shot the pilot for "In Living Color," the Keenen Ivory Wayans com- edy show that ran from 1990 to 1994. "In Living Color" was the real spring- board for Carrey's stardom, after sev- eral years of small parts in movies and a failed sitcom, "The Duck Factory," which lasted for only thirteen weeks in 1984. Apatowwas trying to make it in standup in Los Angeles at the time and was "at the lowest rung of the comedy ladder," as he put it, speaking to me from his car phone on the Pacific Coast Highwa)T. He said that Carreywas at the point where he had broken away from doing impressions-"He would go on- stage every night and just spew what was in his mind." By taking risks that were rare in the world of standup, he eventually "reached his goal of being able to do an hour without doing James Dean." 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